Data Studies Program Will Give Liberal Arts Majors a Boost in Employment

By Jeffrey Day - A team from the University of California, Davis, traveled to Silicon Valley and throughout Northern California a few months ago, meeting with managers at more than 20 companies to gauge what they were looking for in employees.

"They would really like to hire graduates of UC Davis who have the critical thinking and the big picture skills of social science and humanities," said Joe Dumit, director of the UC Davis Institute for Social Sciences. "But they also need these graduates to understand their number one problem: data."

Data includes many kinds of raw materials ranging from demographic facts and figures to information stored on mobile phones, businesses' customer profiles and even social media postings. The rapidly increasing quantity of this material is commonly dubbed "big data" and can be used for research in many fields.

"The everyday life of companies is really about understanding data," Dumit said.